Members in Focus

Vintessential Laboratories

When a young oenologist and qualified chemist, Greg Howell, returned from the 1994 vintage in Burgundy, he saw an opportunity to replicate the model of regional wine laboratories he’d witnessed in France.

And so, Vintessential Laboratories was born, with the first lab established on the Mornington Peninsula.

It is here that Greg met his partner and now joint-owner of Vintessential, Jenny Stonier, the daughter of one of the Peninsula’s founding wine families and a respected wine marketer.

In time, the Mornington lab would be followed by two more in Margaret River and the Granite Belt of southern Queensland.

At first, we only offered a testing service, but our ever-growing team has gained a reputation over the years for listening to customer’s requests and shrewdly observing their unspoken needs.
Accordingly, we started supplying the same laboratory reagents and equipment we use ourselves to the winemakers who carry out their own testing, dispatching Australia-wide daily.

It didn’t take long before we then decided to manufacture our Enzymatic test kits, the only ones made in Australia exclusively to test wine.

Not only do we now sell these worldwide but they also won us the WBM Export Award at WISA’s Supplier of the Year ceremony in 2013.

Inevitably, that led WBM magazine to nominate Greg Howell as an “unsung hero” and one of its 50 Stars of 2013.

Expanding on our services but remaining true to our core, Vintessential Laboratories now analyse water, soil and plant vine material as well as wine, beer and cider, and distribute the famous Oenobrands products of Anchor Yeast and Rapidase Enzymes nationally.

Today, Vintessential has three laboratories dealing with over 1,000 wineries here in Australia and through five distributors globally.

To top it all off, as Greg and Jenny’s daughters Eve and Elke grow up, they are becoming more and more involved in the business, providing a third generation of this oenological family.